BREEDERS’ CUP by Greg Schutz

Now that he lives alone, Doc works every day. On Christmas morning, he’s in the birthing pen of Harlan Trimble’s dairy barn, squinting through the rising fog of his own breath as he sutures the hindquarters of a Holstein. “Cast her goddamn wethers again,” Harlan said over the phone, which means that for the second time in three days the cow, shivering and straining, has rolled her uterus inside-out and spilled it into the open air. Three days after a stillbirth, she can’t seem to stop pushing.
For the second time, Doc washes and replaces what she has spilled. Barehanded, he eases the red folds back into the body. The exposed tissue hasn’t necrotized yet, but it has grown cool. Harlan’s been up at the farmhouse half the morning, watching his children tear open presents he can’t afford. Standing back now, he packs tobacco behind his lip with his thumb. For him, this is just another story in a book of bad news. He’s already confided to Doc that, barring a miracle, he’ll have to sell off before the end of the coming year. Leaning at the gate to the pen, he drops a red ball of spittle between his toes.
The mattress suture is designed to anchor skin to muscle and to draw the muscles tight, but Doc’s seen surgical tape pop like floss. Certain animals persist in their suffering, refusing to relent. Again and again, they pour their steaming insides out, until shock and exhaustion finally bring them to ground. They lie on their sides, panting heavily until they stop, stubborn to death. The cow shudders – nervous, hurting. “Hey, now,” Doc says. “Hey there, dearie.” Sometimes he hums snippets of songs. Finished, he steps back, wiping his fingers on his coveralls.
“Laced her up like an old boot,” Harlan says.
Doc pours the bucket of Betadine suds into the frozen barnyard. For breakfast, he had a banana, three aspirin, and two cups of coffee; the idea of conversation exhausts him.
Besides, what’s there to say? Three nights ago, Doc hauled the calf out by the forelegs – a baby bull, perfectly formed, so freshly suffocated he could hardly believe it wasn’t still alive. He took the soft muzzle between his hands and blew into one wet nostril and then the other. His mouth filled with salt, but this changed nothing. Harlan fired up the backhoe to dig a shallow grave. Doc found an old stool in the milk house at the end of the barn, lingering a moment in the humid warmth of the holding tanks and condensers, popping his icy knuckles. As the cow nosed the dead thing, lapping the afterbirth, he sat down to offer what comfort he could, emptying her heavy udder, milk steaming in the straw.
Late that night, home again, alone, he watched without any particular interest a meaningless West Coast bowl game between two directional schools and caught himself, as he reached for his beer on the end table, humming. As if to soothe a hurting animal. But there was no animal around to be soothed except him.
A cold Appalachian morning, Christmas, air like a blade at the leading edge of winter. Harlan scribbles a check and asks Doc not to cash it right away. The cow groans and pushes, passing a bit of urine. The sutures hold for now.

The squirrel lies in a looped nest of entrails, tail flung back like a tattered cape, forelegs outstretched in a dream of flight. Margaret’s breath catches. It’s shocking, how much can spill from one small body. Still, when the dog trotted up to the house with blood on his muzzle, she’d known what she was going to find.
He watches from the screened-in porch, fluting thin whines through his nose like a teakettle. The dog. Prichard’s Flying Aureliano.
Boxes clutter the detached garage. Six months here, and still she’s unpacking – or still not unpacking. “Goodness,” her friend Alice said, mildly exasperated, when she and Win came over for Thanksgiving dinner. “Boxed up to leave already?”
Margaret locates the shovel, together with a rake, a weed cutter, a pitchfork, and a posthole digger, all stacked inside a corroded fifty-five-gallon drum – equipment and décor courtesy of the house’s previous owner, an elderly widower who sold the property for a song after his lung cancer went into remission. He was moving to Hatteras, he told Margaret. He was going to spend whatever miraculous days remained to him beside the sea.
She slips the shovel beneath the squirrel, using a stick to drag a stray coil of viscera onto the blade. Real country living, the thing she left Asheville to find. This, at least, is how she explained the decision to Dennis and Ryan, her sons.
Christmas morning, and she’s burying an eviscerated rodent in her backyard.
“What you need here,” Alice said at Thanksgiving, patting Win’s knuckles expectantly, “is a dog.”
Prichard’s Flying Aureliano won’t follow Margaret inside as long as she’s standing by the door. She has to step into the kitchen, out of sight, before he’ll slink in from the porch. He’s a brindled greyhound, an old racer. His long face carries all the marks of his breed’s hemophiliac nobility, its brittle intelligence.
Win manages a local animal shelter. “Fresh out of sweet little things,” she said when Margaret visited. “They go fast, this time of year.” She regarded Margaret with what Margaret decided to call a gimlet eye. “If that’s what you’re looking for.”
Margaret worries Win is unkind to Alice, whom Margaret has known forever. She has no real grounds for suspicion. There’s just something pushy and judgmental about Win, a self-righteousness that suggests the capacity for cruelty. It’s easy to imagine her indignant, fanatical.
Sometimes, though – particularly at night, when sleep is slow to come – a cold charity descends, transforming Margaret’s assessments. Win is ten years younger than Margaret and Alice. Like an animal’s, her life is unidirectional; she suffers no doubts. She has found her calling, and she has found Alice. Alice, for whom Margaret nursed an impossible crush through much of junior high, when they shared the kind of terrifyingly intimate friendship that must only exist, she thinks, between girls of a certain age.
Margaret may only be jealous, after all, only bitter. Only damaged: a divorcee.
Trying to impress Win, or else to challenge her, she asked about the old greyhound, abandoned by his previous owner.
In the kitchen, she wets a washcloth to clean the greyhound’s muzzle. Dennis, Ryan, and Ryan’s wife will be arriving any moment. There can be no sign of blood.
“It’s kind of quiet,” Ryan said, the first time he and Stephanie visited her here.
Dennis, customarily, was less cautious. “Is this some sort of midlife thing?”
“I like the quiet life,” Margaret told Ryan. With Dennis, meanwhile, she adopted a tone of bluff dismissal: “You don’t think your old mother can take care of herself out here?” Her sons have long divided her; catering to them means splitting into separate, distinct selves. Now she’s become a homesteading pioneer for Dennis, and for Ryan a cloistered nun. In truth, she’s not sure what she’s doing out here, twenty minutes from the nearest supermarket. If this is a response to her first year after the divorce – gathering loose ends in a rented townhouse in a West Asheville neighborhood too hip for her and too young by half – it’s an overcorrection. She’s skidding now; in some small yet fundamental way, she’s lost her grip on the road.
But her sons – and their father, for she’s sure Dennis, at least, tells Parker everything – don’t need to know this.
Over the past several days, Margaret and the dog have reached an uneasy détente: he’ll stand rigid beneath her hand, allowing her to trace the length of his spine. Now, though, he retreats, nails ticking through the den, past the pitiful plastic spruce, down the hall. She follows, washcloth trailing droplets – her foolish, dotted path – and corners him in the back bathroom, where the toilet works but the faucet sputters rust and the claw-footed tub is cracked beyond repair, a beached whale. The greyhound cowers, gazing up at her with bleak, soulful eyes.
No. Not at her. At the washcloth in her hand.
The torn and emptied squirrel. The mechanical rabbit, that whole past life.
“Oh, honey,” she says, dropping the washcloth into the tub. She settles herself cross-legged on the linoleum’s scuffed, gritty roses and offers her empty hand.
This is what her life has come to, eighteen months divorced: holding her breath while a dog named Prichard’s Flying Aureliano edges forward with his bloody, uncertain snout, waiting to see whether he means to sniff, lick, or sink his teeth into the delicate net of bones she’s extended. Carefully, as if her touch carries a heat he must ease into, the dog slips his head beneath her hand. The ridged dome of his skull fills her palm. After a minute, she takes his felted ear between her thumb and forefinger and begins, gently, to rub. And from Prichard’s Flying Aureliano comes a noise she’s never heard before: a moan, a door swinging open in his chest. All at once, he melts into her.
Why now, after days of fruitless overtures? A gentler dialect of body language she’s stumbled upon, a scent she gives off when she’s feeling sympathetic, or simply the final slow erosion of his defenses. She loops an arm over his muscular shoulders. His panting fogs the space around them with wet copper, the scent of a small, terrified death. A belt tightens around Margaret’s ribs, an emotion she refuses to name.
They’re still sitting together, his bloody muzzle cradled in her hands, when she hears the crunch of tires on the gravel drive.

Doc’s daughter calls at lunchtime. Dani is nineteen, a sophomore at Tulane, down in New Orleans. This is her first Christmas away from home; she’s spending the holiday with her boyfriend’s family in Lake Charles. Josh is twenty-three, a roofer and a house-painter. Once, Dani sent a picture of the two of them to Doc’s computer. She’s a pretty girl, lanky and freckled with a quick, aggressive smile. In the picture, Josh looks fat. He has round pink cheeks and a sad, fuzzy beard. “Merry Christmas, honey,” Doc says. “How are you? How’s Louisiana?”
“Warm,” she says. “The sun down here, even in winter – you’d barely believe it.”
Out the window, Doc can see his front yard, crisp grass beneath a gray sky, blackberry brambles snarled at the fringe of the woods. The sun’s a powdery disc. He lives at the end of a dead-end road, a house he and his wife chose for its seclusion.
“Dad, I want you to ask me something. Ask me why I’m so happy.”
In spite of himself, Doc smiles. “Okay, then. Why?”
“Oh,” she says, “no. I shouldn’t say. Let it be a surprise.”
Dani and Josh are flying up for New Year’s. That evening, Doc flips the switch by her bedroom door off and on, studying the room in darkness and in light. It’s full of things she’s left behind. A plush menagerie atop the dresser, a prom-night snapshot of her with some friends – parrot-colored dresses and beaming, embarrassed faces – taped to the corner of the mirror. A lump in the middle of the made bed turns out to be one of his daughter’s tee-shirts. Spreading the wrinkled thing smooth reveals the word Rockstarrr in sequined letters. Why the extra r’s? Unanswerable question, a mystery of teenage girlhood.
Sometimes, the thought that he’s paying thirty thousand dollars a year to send his child hundreds of miles away for months at a time makes Doc’s chest ache. Her absence is an egg he’s swallowed whole.
Susan, Doc’s wife, died in a single-car accident when Dani was sixteen. No rhyme or reason to it; she just took a curve too fast. She left Dani and Doc alone together. Somehow, they survived. They performed the hard labor of little gestures day after day. He browned hamburger in a skillet and collected her laundry from the floor. She did her homework beside him at the desk in his office. “You’re crying,” she said, her voice buoyant with wonder. He hung his coveralls out to dry, and the next morning the sun soaked and rebounded from the gold-stitched rod of Asclepius over the breast.
Doc is still trying to figure out what to do without her.
He sits in her room with her shirt in his hands, replaying the music of their conversation. Ask me why I’m so happy.

At the Asheville airport, she throws her arms around his neck and he kisses her hair. “Darling,” he says. She smiles and steps back, one hand on his shoulder, swinging aside to allow Josh in. He’s taller than Doc expected. Not fat, either, but broad through the chest and shoulders. Still, despite all this bulk stuffed into a sweater and corduroys, he seems young. Perhaps it’s the way he moves – gingerly, as if a tiny Josh sits deep within his body, pulling levers whose signals take a moment to reach his hands and feet. His eyes are bright behind black-framed glasses. “Dr. Jeffries. So great to finally meet you.”
“People call me Doc.”
“Okay – Doc.” He actually blushes. But his grip is strong, his palm roughened by work.
They eat at the steakhouse across from Dani’s old high school. In a foothill town of four thousand or so, this counts as fine dining. Dani and Doc used to eat here on nights when he was too exhausted or heartsick to cook. Filled with halting questions and answers, charged silences, and shocking moments of eye contact, those nights out together felt more than anything like dates. Later, finally home, his daughter twists on the couch, hands knotted between her knees.
“This is harder to say,” she confesses, “than I thought it would be.”
Doc looks up from the fireplace and the little house of kindling he’s built. Outside, Josh gathers split logs from the pile. Evening clings to the windows like lint.
“I was going to tell you on the phone the other day. But then I couldn’t.”
“It’s about Josh?”
Dani nods.
His chest billows with purpose. “You’re home now. Whatever it is, we’ll deal with it.”
“Dad, we’re engaged.”
She pulls a ring from her pocket and slips it on: a silver band, a little pearl.
Josh, Doc thinks. Little boy in a man suit. Josh, who has been nothing but pleasant, socking away sirloin and mashed potatoes, asking questions about Doc’s job, answering questions about his own, speaking in a husky voice that stammers sometimes, as though certain sentences must be primed before they can be drawn up from his belly. Josh, who pushes his glasses up his nose after speaking and looks to Dani for approval, watching her with a tiny, hopeful smile. Josh the painter, Josh the roofer. Silly Josh. Josh the husband.
“You’re so young,” he says.
“I know.”
It’s difficult to read her expression.
Josh returns, depositing an armload of firewood beside Doc. Dani shows Josh the hand that wears the ring.
“Oh,” Josh says. For some reason, he extends his own hand to Doc, offering a shake. Doc stares. Josh frowns: he, too, seems confused by the gesture. He sits with Dani on the couch, their knees touching. “Let’s, let’s . . .” He squints, struggling to recall a line he’s spent hours rehearsing. “Let’s talk about this.”
“Excuse me,” Doc says.
Outside, night doesn’t fall, but rather sweeps up from the earth into the branches, the sky. Doc sits on the front steps, blowing into his palms. Once, Susan told him about a Sunday morning when she was eight or ten weeks old. Her parents carried her to the altar of their church to have her baptized. The pastor dipped his hands in a bowl of water and washed her scalp. He spoke her name before the hushed congregation and pronounced her beloved in the eyes of God.
Dani sits beside him. “Cold out here, Dad.”
“‘Ask me why I’m so happy.’”
“What? Oh. Yes.” She doesn’t sound like a little girl. “Yes, I am.”
“Okay,” he says.
“Dad, there’s something else.”
In the dark, it’s easy to mistake her for Susan: the same sharp chin and nose, the same sharp smile hooking her mouth to one side. But in sunlight, he knows, her green eyes reveal honeyed rings around the pupils, a perfection entirely her own.
“Something else,” he says.
She lifts his hand from his knee and places it on her stomach.

On New Year’s Eve, Dennis and his friends drink beer on the porch, laughing and roughhousing on the other side of the cold glass while Margaret sits with Ryan and Stephanie, watching the ball drop in New York. Afterward, she falls asleep on the sofa and wakes in darkness. Ryan and Stephanie are gone, but a few of the boys are still outside. A tiny orange coal travels in a circle, lighting bits of faces. She recognizes Dennis’s lips, the whiskered curve of his jaw. The next morning, the boys are gone. Dennis sleeps beneath a quilt on the living room floor.
In the kitchen, Ryan pours water into the coffeemaker. “You’re the first one up,” he says, discounting himself, so resolutely in character that, despite the new surroundings, she almost expects to hear Parker’s heavy morning tread on the stairs.
She takes the dog for a walk.
The woods are bare, shot through with cold sun. The dog slides along intently, pulling in the world through his nose. Margaret, huffing, follows at the length of a leash, the pace of a dogtrot. She would’ve thought she’d stopped loving Parker long before they opened the divorce proceedings. But her love is robust; new longing sprouts unbidden from old habit like shoots coppicing from a stump.
Dennis is sitting up when she returns, his back to the sofa, holding a mug. “I like this,” he says, rocking from side to side, making the floorboards creak. “Totally primitive.”

That night, her last with the boys, they caravan into town for dinner at the steakhouse. As always, an atmosphere of casual indulgence pervades the restaurant. Steaks are ringed with opalescent fat, chicken and fish encased in batter. Salads are iceberg wedges with shreds of carrot, soaked in mayonnaise and oil. The buttermilk mashed potatoes are wonderful. made fresh daily, the menu notes, providing another reason to suspect the salads, for which no such claim is made. Margaret resists speculating on the ratio of buttermilk to potato. Ryan orders a third beer and offers a rambling, good-natured, pointless anecdote about the Congressional office where he works. Dennis leans back, glancing at his sister-in-law’s sweatered breasts. Stephanie ignores the glances, feigning enthrallment with her husband’s story – or else she really doesn’t notice and really is enthralled. She’s a sweet girl; anything’s possible.
After dinner, Ryan hands his keys to Margaret without embarrassment or apology. Dennis kisses Margaret’s cheek, shakes his brother’s hand, and enfolds Stephanie in a lingering hug. He’s continuing up the mountain to Asheville – where, since his return from Hawaii a few months back, he’s been living on Parker’s dime. Meanwhile, Ryan and Stephanie will spend one more night before driving back to D.C., where Ryan aids the local state representative and Stephanie studies international law at George Mason. Dennis’s rattletrap Jeep turns left, runs a stale yellow, and disappears.
“I’m worried about him,” Ryan says from the back seat. “This morning, there were marijuana butts all over the porch.”
Beside Margaret, Stephanie fidgets. Margaret understands. Ryan would have told her this already; they would have agreed not to worry Margaret with it. But now his tongue’s been loosened. Her elder boy: sweetheart, do-gooder, tattletale.
Marijuana butts. “They’re called roaches, honey.”
Silence. But it’s too late to worry about Ryan and Stephanie’s opinions. She lost them, Margaret imagines, upon their arrival, when they met the dog with the bloody muzzle and the mother with the bloody hands. “Oh, he likes to kill squirrels,” she said, affecting breeziness. Stephanie stiffened. A portcullis of bland concern descended over Ryan’s features.
She imagines Dennis recounting the past week to Parker, back in Asheville. Have you talked to Mom lately? She’s primitive! The fantasy is darkly satisfying.
“Do you think he’s happy?” Ryan asks at last.
Who can know such a thing about themselves, Margaret wonders, let alone about anyone else?
“He’s different,” Ryan insists. “Than before Hawaii, I mean.”
In the mirror, Margaret watches Stephanie reach back without turning around, her fingers finding Ryan’s wrist. Ryan is thin, with slender, girlish forearms; his wrists are braceletted with coarse black hair – Parker’s contribution, one thing she’ll give him credit for – and knobbed by porcelain bone. Margaret knows them well.
Having planned to leave by eight, Ryan and Stephanie are out the door the next morning at seven-fifty-five. Margaret waves as the Subaru slides through the trees. Winter engulfs the fading motor, the cold air between one ridgeline and the next faintly tympanic, like the hollow inside a shell. Rubbing goosebumps from her arms, she turns and goes inside. She is depleted; Dennis and Ryan’s lives have thundered past like semis on the interstate, and some vital wisp of herself has lifted in their wake and followed. A pleasant anhedonia settles over her. Ryan’s wrists are Stephanie’s to touch. As long as he’s up in Asheville, Dennis remains Parker’s priority, not hers. And Parker, now that her sons are gone, is only a ghost.
The dog curls between toilet and tub in the back bathroom. Throughout the past week’s bustle, this has been his sanctuary.
“Out?” she asks.
They pass the silvered barn with its rotten roof, its weary southpaw tilt. Margaret is afraid to enter, lest it collapse. From this distance, though, the house seems equally suspect: the peeling clapboards, the screened-in porch with its sheepish, smiling sag. Beyond the barn, the wooded ridge rises. The dog trots along, sniffing. Day by day, she is showing him the bounds of her land – how to run free, how to return. One of Win’s recommendations, actually. She speaks through Alice: “Win thinks . . .” “Win mentioned . . .”
Margaret has grown fond of these explorations, herself. She, too, is learning the topography of the ridgeline, its crenels and outcrops, its deadfalls and thickets. She has begun to lay claim to this place. Here it is, she thinks, jogging along, sneakers chuffing through dead leaves. Her primitive new life.

* * *

A livestock veterinarian by trade, Doc spends several days a year with dogs, offering discount vaccinations for rabies, distemper, adenovirus, parvo. This blustery afternoon, he’s in the parking lot of the local shelter, combing his fingers through fur and jabbing needles home. A line has formed. January’s a popular time for vaccinations; most of these dogs were gifts.
Win, the shelter’s manager, supervises the volunteers, collects payments, fills out paperwork, and offers customers cocoa from a thermos. She’s a big, capable woman with the faintest shadow of a mustache. “Margaret and John Quick,” she says, as if introducing a couple. The pair does, in fact, seem well-matched: a woman and a greyhound, both fine-boned and slim, with long noses and large, slightly protuberant eyes.
“John Quick,” Doc says.
“His racing name was ridiculous,” the owner replies. “So, ‘John.’”
“And ‘Quick’?”
“Oh, that name’s mine. But appropriate, right?”
Doc pinches a fold atop the brindled neck, slips the needle into the tented skin, and thumbs the plunger. “Good boy.” Palming the syringe, he knuckles the muscled trench between the high shoulderblades while the dog pants into his other hand. He’s always liked greyhounds – their streamlined faces and wicker-basket chests. A volatile marriage of power and frailty, like thoroughbreds. Last fall, Doc watched the Breeders’ Cup on television. As the horses paraded to the starting gate, tossing their heads and dancing, his eyes prickled with tears. The poor things: attach those muscles to such matchstick legs and of course bones were going to break. Everyone knew what it would lead to, but still it went on. The horses fired themselves down the track to the clamor of bells, their bodies elongating, the clinging jockeys blurring to blots. He rubbed his eyes, furious and embarrassed. In two minutes, it was over.
The woman is smiling. “You went somewhere a moment.”
“Ha. Guess I did.”
She thanks him; he nods. She’s ushered to a nearby table, where a volunteer places the label from the vial Doc used in a logbook and delivers a pitch about charitable donations.
Win leans close. “She liked you.”
How does she know? Win only shrugs, smiling like a sphinx. The world’s no mystery to her, as it so often is to Doc.

Alice plows a chunk of porterhouse into her mashed potatoes. Margaret smiles, picturing Win’s consternation: Win, the evangelical vegan. Margaret can’t dispute her on the facts – who could? – but she’s repulsed by Win’s certainty, as she is by certainty in general. In the face of such righteousness, it feels good to sin. It feels good to corrupt Alice with these occasional dinners at the steakhouse. They disregard personal and global health, breathing the air of their shared history.
They’ve been talking about Dennis. Parker left a voice message yesterday: their son has been fired again. Or he’s quit – details are unclear. Parker was angry, chewing his words. “Enunciate, please,” Margaret used to say when he shouted at her. This only made him angrier, more garbled.
“Just call me,” he said at last – taking a breath, gathering himself. “We’ve got to figure what to do with this kid.”
Is it really so bad, Margaret wants to know, that she hasn’t called back?
“Yes,” Alice says. She has a plump, comic face that scrunches with mirth or distaste, a little upturned dollop of a nose, a milkmaid’s complexion: creamy brow, ruddy cheeks, faded blue eyes.
For a time when she was thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen, Margaret knew Alice’s skin nearly as well as her own. They staged giddy raids on each other’s bodies. Margaret was what her mother, mortifyingly, called a late bloomer, Alice just the opposite. Margaret studied the moles on Alice’s left hip, her rosy downturned nipples, the firm roll of flesh pinched above the waist of her skirt, with a fascination that left her slightly ill. Memories of one encounter – as innocent as their toes knocking beneath the cafeteria table or as terrifying as slipping a hand inside the waistband of Alice’s underwear to touch that shocking hair – bred thoughts of the next. The steakhouse, with its buffet lines and sneeze guards, its joyous din, is pleasantly reminiscent of that school cafeteria. With Alice, Margaret first glimpsed the various intimacies and revelations of sex. Alice was her first love, her first heartbreak.
All this lies between them now – on the table, beside the steaks.
“I will call,” Margaret promises. “Eventually.”
The possibility that this might be a lie settles between them as well.
Parker is all burly confidence, his russet hair expertly graying at the temples, a signet ring embossed with the palmetto of the Citadel decorating one enormous, manicured hand. He heads a private security firm – a booming business now that Asheville has become a destination of sorts for wealthy coastal dwellers, the surrounding hills a hive of vacation homes and gated communities – and reads philosophy in his spare time. He invokes Hobbes on the state of nature and the creation of property, John Rawls on the veil of ignorance and the social contract. He has a child’s firm belief in the power of fairness and a soldier’s focused intensity. When he says Rawls, it sounds like he’s growling. Arguing with him makes Margaret feels vicious and doomed, a dog bred to attack a grizzly.
During the divorce, Dennis – a mechanic by training if not always by trade – left for Maui, to service tractors and combines at a Monsanto seed farm. The announcement shocked Margaret: not only the distance, but the employer. Parker, in the midst of their other negotiations, mocked her concern. “People raise such a stink about genetically modified food. But really, Margaret, can you tell me what’s wrong with it?” He affected an exaggerated drawl, a send-up of shrill mountain ignorance: “I ain’t eating nothin’ with genetics in it!”
This was how she sounded to him, Margaret understood.
Worse, she had no ready response; she didn’t know the science behind her position. She’d been too lax in her beliefs, too complacent. A characteristic flaw, Parker would no doubt attest. In any case, there would be no voice of reason in this debate over Dennis’s future. All she could do was retreat into herself, concentrating on escaping the marriage intact.
Dennis returned after a year, sunburned and broke. Parker paid for his ticket home, for his Jeep, for his Asheville apartment. This was in part because Parker could afford these things – she’d wanted no piece of his business, his profits, in the settlement; she has her own accounting work, which is enough. But it was also because Parker, in winning the Monsanto argument, seems to have won Dennis. The jobs their son quits, the jobs from which he’s fired – his bosses have all been “control freaks,” his coworkers “blowhards” – the drugs he puts into his body: these are Parker’s problems now. Margaret has learned to let go.
Alice knows all this. In moments, and without speaking, they pore over the old grievances together before moving to new topics. They eat, conversation forming and dissipating like clouds. Dessert arrives. Margaret hands her phone across the table to show Alice a photo of John Quick, his paws and snout muddy from digging in the woods, the kitchen linoleum stitched with wet prints. He gazes up from the center of the mess. To Margaret’s eye, there is something regal, imperious, in his expression: Behold!
“Getting fat,” Alice says.
“So what? He’s retired.”
Alice squints at Margaret over their wedges of cheesecake, her nose wrinkling, a familiar expression of fond judgment.
“What?” Margaret asks.
But she already knows. She’s become the kind of person who shows people pictures of her pet. Last night, John Quick curled at the foot of her bed – she tried lifting him onto it, but he only sat shaking, peering mournfully over the edge, until she helped him down – sighing endlessly through sleep, a steam engine. She thinks about him when they’re apart, worrying he’ll be lonely or bored. This never happened with the pets her sons had, growing up. John Quick is different. She considers him often.
Like a pining schoolgirl.
“You look happy,” Alice says.

Late winter is the season for equine infectious anemia testing. Doc’s all over the western third of the state, pulling blood. As he gathers vials and ships them in batches to a laboratory in Knoxville, his refrigerator fills and empties, a cold heart. From the top of Del Carroll’s sloping pasture, he can see thirty miles: rows of gray mountains daubed onto a gray sky. A cellular tower winks atop the nearest ridge, red lights afloat over a sifting of February snow.
His phone buzzes: Dani.
check yr email
The horse snorts, braided muscles stiffening, as Doc pushes the needle into a vein thick as his thumb. “Hush now,” Doc whispers into the large, triangular ear. The syringe draws full of blood a hue between chocolate and wine, which he injects through a rubber stopper into a glass vial. The glass fogs. Beneath that film, the dark cells are all aligned, still waiting to be pulled into the lungs.
“My little girl had an ultrasound this morning,” he says in the farmhouse kitchen.
Del Carroll, who has twin sons and a daughter – a toddler whose voice rings through the rooms, refusing some request made by Kim, Del’s wife – raises a mug of coffee in salute. “Grandpa Doc.”
Home in the evening, Doc pulls a beer from behind the vials and opens Dani’s email. A Rorschach blot fills the monitor. It could be a map of ocean currents, solar winds, a nebula thousands of light-years across. But amidst the chaotic swirls Doc spots a long, orderly curve, the dome of a skull. His finger leaves a smudge on the screen.

“I know it’s impossible,” Susan said. Still, she remembered. A hand had cupped her head; water trailed through her hair. A finger lay across her brow, shielding her eyes. Faces floated in the middle distance. Beyond them lay a vaulted roof, carved from clouds.
A sea of voices. Everything was strange. Water curled mysteriously in her ears.
She told him this during their engagement, when she spent her days off riding with Doc from farm to farm. She was a registered nurse, fearless. She slipped a hemostat into a surgical incision in a Hanoverian’s flank, clamping off a blood vessel while Doc worked. If anyone could remember something that happened when they were two months old, it was Susan. Her perceptions arrived with fiery clarity.
Doc envies that fire. His early memories are a muddle, shapeless days under a distant, scattered sun. He knows his father had small white calluses across the pads of his palms. He knows his mother had a false canine she removed before eating, placing it in a glass of water beside her plate, and that sometimes she grinned, gap-toothed, across the table to make him laugh. But as soon as he tries to remember a specific instance – a time his father touched his face, a meal when his mother smiled – his knowledge dissolves into mere information.
The present is no different. His business ledger contains week after week of appointments and emergencies, supplies ordered and received, mileage numbers for his truck. Doc remembers these things only in the thinnest possible way, recollections as flimsy as the pages the ink bleeds through. His days flow together, undifferentiated, as if he’s lost the ability to make new memories entirely.
He remembers his daughter. He remembers his wife.
As for the rest of it, the time without them, the whole before and after of his life?
He is forty-seven years old.

John Quick is dying.
Margaret finds him sprawled in the back bathroom one night toward the end of March, his feet twitching between the feet of the tub. His tongue dangles; his chest squeezes through endless rapid, shallow breaths. His eyes are wide, gluey whites revealed, turned to the ceiling in an expression approaching religious ecstasy.
It’s Sunday. The automated message at the nearest veterinary clinic lists their weekday hours, but no emergency contact. Or was there? Too late; Margaret’s already hung up. She’s an accountant. She loves the slow lives of numbers, combining and dividing as they make their long migrations down and across the columns of a spreadsheet. She’s no good in a crisis, as Parker was quick to point out. “For crying out loud,” he said as they drove Ryan to the emergency room for an appendectomy. Then he laughed, because that was what she was doing – crying out loud, far more loudly and tearfully than their son.
“Calm down,” Alice says when Margaret calls. “I’m going to put Win on, all right?”
“Win? No, I don’t want to talk to – ”
“Listen,” Win says. “Here’s what you’re going to do.”

Win calls to warn him: “Surprise.” A few minutes later, a battered Camry rattles up the washboard drive he’s long meant to have packed and graded. A woman springs from the car, takes a few running steps toward the house, and turns back, stricken. Spotting him in the kitchen window, she waves with both hands.
It would be a lie to say he doesn’t recognize her.
When he asks if the dog has ingested anything unusual, Margaret Quick touches the base of her throat. “Unusual? What?” Nothing to do but – in the absence of any better ideas, without time even to determine what a better idea might look like – the first thing that comes to mind. The dog lies on a carpet remnant in the laundry room. Margaret sits on the floor, her fingers hesitating an inch from his ears, as if fearing the damage a touch might do. In a drinking glass, Doc mixes water and hydrogen peroxide. He draws the solution into a plastic syringe, draws back the wet curtain of John Quick’s jowl with a hooked finger, and slips the syringe between two clenched teeth. Action comforts him: warm fur beneath his fingers, swift rote motions. He gives himself over to the knowledge stored in his hands. In the other room, his half-finished beer scores a cold zero into the coffee table. He hears himself humming low, involuntary notes, an old song.
Margaret watches. Her eyes are round, gull-gray.

The long body clenches. The veterinarian straddles and lifts John Quick, tipping the dog’s head toward the floor. Without moving, Margaret feels herself receding into a corner of the room, tucked away beneath the sink like a bottle of detergent or bleach. Or else they are receding from her, man and dog. She thinks again of Ryan, awaiting surgery, twelve years old – just beginning his long retreat into adulthood, transforming himself from a warm, quiet, gently effeminate boychild into the man he’s become, a permanent stranger, circumspect and decorous. He gazed up at her mournfully as the orderly arrived to wheel him away. “You’ll be fine, honey,” she said. “You’ll be so good.” But she was powerless; it was less than a promise.
The dog heaves, bringing up a brown slurry with a rich, fishy odor.
Fur and flesh. Small, crushed bones. A squirrel.

After rolling the soiled carpet and stuffing it into the garbage bin behind the garage, Doc stands for a minute, leaning against the house. The evening is cool but muggy, hinting at spring. The stars look blurry. He dials Win.
“Where else was I going to send her?” Win asks. “It sounded like an emergency, and you’re nearby. Besides, what other vet’s going to open his doors Sunday night without charging an arm and a leg for it?”
“Okay, sure. But I think she wants to camp here.”
“She’s had a scare, Doc. My God, her dog. Does it make you so uncomfortable?”
Win laughs. As long as Doc’s known her, this has been her response to the cruelty, stinginess, and reticence of the world. She dismisses it, coldly laughing; she, for one, will have none of it. Around Win, it’s impossible to be less than your most generous self without feeling like a joke. Inside, he offers Margaret coffee, and Margaret, despite the hour, agrees.
The coffeemaker burbles. He returns to the laundry room, uncertain. The woman and her dog seem superimposed here, their colors too bright, their edges too distinct. He can think of nothing to say. “He kills squirrels,” she offers. “I keep burying them, but I guess he digs them up.” Is this an explanation, an apology? He falls back on professional talk. Take the dog to his usual vet tomorrow, if anything seems amiss. Most likely, though, everything’s fine. He had a meal that didn’t agree with him, simple as that. “Simple as that,” she repeats. He glances at the coffeemaker. Still burbling.
“You know what my son said to me after his appendectomy?”
He shakes his head.
“He said, ‘You had me all concerned.’ Concerned. Twelve years old. But that’s him, that’s Ryan.”
A son. He wouldn’t have guessed her a mother. Her skittish, erratic energy recalls the spinster women he sometimes meets through his work. They live alone, sharing trailers or ramshackle cottages with their cats and dogs. A she-goat to keep the kudzu out of the vegetable plot, a mule for good conversation. They’re proud of their loneliness, these women. They pay with wadded bills pulled loose from a shoebox or stripped from a roll buried in the flour tin. Doc’s a cloud across the face of their day. They eye him like they’re waiting for the thunderbolt.
Maybe Margaret senses this line of thought, or maybe she’s just filling his silence. She leaps ahead, talking rapidly. Her ex-husband unmarried her – that’s the word she uses. He took back the vows; he didn’t mean them anymore. “But he waited until our youngest was out of the house. At least he did that much.”
“I’m sorry.”
She flicks the apology away. “I mean, a part of me felt – oh, not relieved, exactly. Unburdened. Parker, the kids: I was done being concerned. Let them care for themselves. Goodbye to all that. Goodbye. Goodbye to that whole, whole . . . that whole . . .”
She looks up at him, flushed, flyaway hairs glued to her cheeks.
“That whole cup of trembling,” Doc supplies.
“Oh – that.”
The coffeemaker beeps, rescuing them both.
By the time he returns with her mug, she’s wiped her eyes and run her fingers through her hair. One hand strokes the dog’s ribs. The dog blinks with every touch.
Doc lowers himself to the floor, too. The cup . . . Susan’s words, the old-time religion of her childhood. He hasn’t mentioned her to Margaret, but it feels as if he’s told her everything.
“I should apologize.” Margaret studies her coffee. “That was what Parker would have called an outburst.”
“I have a daughter myself.” This, too, feels enormous, a confession. “Sent her off to college last fall.”
She makes a noise of acknowledgment, still embarrassed, not looking at him.
“She’s pregnant now.”
“What?” It takes a moment. Then she laughs. “Oh, no.” She covers her mouth, but it’s no use. She laughs and laughs. A rich, dark sound – it must leave stains, coloring any conversation it touches. Finally, she gathers herself. “No shit,” she says, panting.
Nothing for a time. Three sets of breath running along at different speeds, overlapping.
“I am sorry,” Margaret says.
“For what?”
She giggles. Her cheeks are wet again.

A hand-addressed envelope arrives in the mail, quaintly out-of-place amidst advertising circulars and bills. Inside is a photograph of Margaret and John Quick – a self-portrait, the camera held at arm’s length. Her other arm is around the dog, their heads drawn together, the resemblance clear. Folded around the photo is a brief thank-you note on a sheet of letterhead. Her cursive is large, swooping, the product of a swift pen. Margaret Quick, cpa.
If you need a hand with your taxes, she writes. But Doc’s already filed.
Still, he feeds her number to his phone, asking it to remember.

Often, that spring and into the summer, Parker calls to complain about Dennis. “He won’t listen,” Parker says. “I talk to him and it’s like I’m not even there.”
“Sure,” Dennis replies when Margaret calls him in response. “Dad’s just full of advice.”
She hangs up, a warm sense of solidarity overspreading her. Parker’s a bully: it’s no mystery why someone wouldn’t want to talk to him.
“He doesn’t look for work anymore,” Parker says. “Just smokes pot and plays video games all day.”
“And cashes your checks,” Margaret says. Because that’s Parker’s real concern, isn’t it? She hangs up in the middle of his ensuing tirade. Dennis is twenty-one. She doesn’t blame him for lacking Parker’s preternatural drive, his suffocating sense of duty.
“Yes,” she tells Dennis, “he’s full of it.”
But she wakes, one July night, to a call from county lockup. Dennis talks fast, slurring: something about a fight at a bar. “Arrested?” she asks, hoarse with sleep. From the floor, John Quick raises his head, doubtful.
“Spring me, Ma? Bake a key in a cake?”
He grins when he sees her, one eye puffy and dark. Blood rims his teeth.
“Don’t freak out,” he says. “Jeez.”
Drunk? Perhaps. But his slurred speech has more to do with his split and swollen lips.
“What happened?”
They’re in her car, heading to his apartment. “You know,” he says. “Stupid shit. Someone says something, someone else says something back.”
“Mmm-hmm. And where do you come in?”
“I was the someone else.”
Always that slight capering edge to his conversation. Even now, prodding the swollen half of his face, he remains hidden, the damage simply another mask. During his months in Maui, she heard almost nothing from him. He posted just a handful of photos on his Facebook page. No gorgeous sunsets, green mountains, blue waves. Instead, farming equipment. A service pit grimed with oil. The dim interior of a bar, mostly empty, front window blank with sunlight. The green rows of a soybean field converging toward a line of low trees. The closest thing to a scenic shot was a single-lane bridge over a stream, the abutments and guardrails hairy with vines. This is my bridge, Dennis wrote.
“And who was the someone?” she asks.
For a little while he’s quiet. Then he turns away, looking out the window. “Donner and Jess.”
“Wait. Your friends did this to you?”
He says nothing. She studies his reflected face in the window, blurred as if by water. Climbing the steps to his building, he stumbles into her, his warm shoulder clubbing her breast, a whiff of sweat and beer. She helps him up, and he lets her help him. Fishing his keys from his pocket, he says, “Let’s not tell Dad, please.”
And this mollifies her a little. Let’s. Let us. Us. He’s chosen her tonight, not his father. He’s chosen her again, as he did at the very beginning. Through a difficult labor he cleaved to her, refusing to be moved. He twisted himself between her hips, a knot drawn tighter and tighter, excruciating. In the end, he had to be cut from her, extracted, like a pit from an olive.
The hall smells of cigarettes. Overhead, fluorescents buzz. It’s not a cheap place, exactly, only institutional, the kind of complex that maintains the illusion of cheapness by shunning character. Though it’s nearly two in the morning, Margaret hears a television burbling through one of the doors they pass. From another comes a strange, rhythmic clinking, like a spoon inside a bowl. “What a night,” Dennis says. The shadow has passed; it’s all a joke again. He opens his door. She glimpses a corner of the darkened apartment: a poster featuring a lingerie model, the taut ligament of her inner thigh disappearing into her bikini briefs; an ashtray on the carpet; a spindled chair lumped with clothes.
“Honey,” she says.
Dennis slips inside. “Yeah?”
“What happened in Hawaii?”
“Don’t tell Dad,” he repeats, closing the door.

Lake Charles, Louisiana, is a liquid. Above the hospital parking lot, bats cut like frenzied fish; moths foam the streetlights. It’s cooler inside, but Doc’s passage down the hall still feels delayed, the air resisting his limbs. The elevator rises like a diving bell. In her room, Dani’s hair spreads across the pillow in a weightless burst.
Josh and his parents – Burt and Marianne, a pleasant couple Doc met during a previous visit, just as plump and drawling and warmly bashful as their son – are there already. They step outside, giving Doc and Dani a minute alone. His hand goes to her forehead.
“It’s not a fever, Dad.”
He tries a smile. But the sight of her, sunk in bed with pale cheeks and a confused expression that masks her pain, reminds him of the little girl sick with the flu to whom he would read winding fantasies of travel and danger – The Lost World, The Hobbit, Watership Down – until she slept.
He received the call this morning: she’d entered labor a week ahead of schedule and three days ahead of the flight he’d booked. At the tiny airport in Asheville, he was told he wouldn’t be able to leave before tomorrow. Driving to Charlotte and hoping for a standby seat seemed hopelessly passive. So he got in his truck and drove first to Atlanta and then southwest, angling across the piney desolation of central Alabama and the casino glare of the Mississippi coast, stopping only for gas. And here she is at last, another contraction arriving, hooding her face, cranking pulleys in her neck.
So he presses his hand to her forehead.
“I was sure I wouldn’t get here in time.”
“What,” she says, “you didn’t think I’d wait?”

It could even be true: twenty minutes later, even as a doctor discusses the decision to suppress or induce, the process begins in earnest. Doc and Josh’s parents are ushered to a waiting room. Plastic plants and vinyl chairs. On the wall, a sailboat in oils, tacking into the wind.
“Never gets easier,” Burt says. His huge, soft hands lie in his lap like a pair of kittens. “Wasn’t easy the first two times, with Tank.”
“Tank?”
“Thomas,” Burt says. “Thomas the Tank.”
Josh’s older brother. He lives in Albuquerque now with his wife, a Russian woman.
“Belorussian,” Marianne clarifies.
“You should see the two of them together.” Burt grins. “This tiny little thing, this doll. And Tank? Well. He’s like us.” He gives Doc a shy glance, almost coy. “I’ll tell you, it’s hard to imagine. That part of it.”
They both are watching him carefully – taking his measure, Doc thinks, in a way they haven’t before. Down the hall, something is happening that will cement the three of them.
“What do you call Josh?”
“Boomer,” she says. “Tank and Boomer.”
They share a laugh, awkward and tense.
“Do you have a name for Dani?” Marianne asks. “Something you call her?”
Doc considers the sailboat. Motel art, the painter’s one trick a curling, waxy buildup to the waves, an added layer of paint imbuing the water with motion and force that the sailboat lacks. Compared to the ocean that resists it, the hull’s just an eggshell, the sail a cloud.
“Darling,” he says.

When Dani was small, Doc used to tease her about her dolls. Dry fluffs of hair, smooth pink skin, molded expressions of contented placidity – these weren’t newborns. “You know what you looked like?” he’d ask. “You know the look on your face?”
This baby is the same. Waterlogged white skin scalded into scarlet patches of stress and fright, a mandrill’s thick mane of cinnamon hair, scrunched features shifting between righteous indignation, anxious inquiry, and walled-off refusal. And yet the body fills the crook of Doc’s arm just so, like an ingeniously carpentered joint. He cradles the child to his chest.
Josh, who has been taking pictures of everything, takes another.
Here is Doc’s grandson. His name is Ezra.

* * *

John Quick woofs once. Parker appears, crossing the lawn with a military stride, double-time. He kicks at a branch torn from a maple by last night’s storm, but it tangles his feet. He grabs it, snaps it over his knee, and whips the pieces from his path.
“Parker,” Margaret calls. “Good morning.”
She could be wrong. It must be nearly noon. At four in the morning she sprang awake to thunder over the valley, rain sheeting down, and the timorous shifting of John Quick beneath the bed. It was as though she were waiting for something: she opened her eyes in a state of electric dread. And then, following a gust that set the porch screens buzzing like hornets, she heard it: a tremendous wet splintering, the whump of an enormous body throwing itself to the ground. The whole house shivered. She rose. On the porch, rain slithered through the screens in a mist. Lightning revealed the yard, shrunk to the size of a room by the storm – and there, in a corner of the room, a collapsed body. The barn.
The screens buzzed. The room went dark. John Quick buried his nose in her hand.
She returned to bed, dripping, and slept as if drugged, waking late to suffocating Sunday heat, pollen-colored sunlight, and the telephone ringing one last time. She ate breakfast, paused to consider the iridescence of a junebug that had found its way to the table – its tiny, wet-wood scent – and made her way outside to survey the damage.
“I’ve been calling,” Parker says. “Where the hell have you been?”
“My barn fell down.” Margaret hasn’t seen him in months, and she’s pleased to discover that the interval has diminished him. Or perhaps it’s simply that he’s here, on her land, where she can name the flowers, where the rustle beneath her feet when she reads on the porch is the resident black snake dreaming of rats as he sleeps in a coil, where her dog stands loyal by her side. Parker was always big, but now he seems excessive, the body beneath the clothes slackening, dripping from the bones. Only his face remains firm, an expression of concern laced with disapproval – Parker has never managed to summon the former without the latter – that suggests she is to blame for the shingles and boards strewn about the yard.
“Dennis is gone,” he says.
“Gone?”
“I thought he might have come here.” Parker bends to pick a loose nail from the grass. He says, “Margaret.”
They walk back to the kitchen. Dennis hasn’t been picking up his phone, Parker says, not for the last several days. This morning, Parker visited his apartment. When his knock went unanswered, he let himself in. “The place was a sty.”
This much doesn’t disturb Margaret. Without bothering to ask, Parker grabs a Mason jar from the drainboard and fills it at the sink. His throat bobs as he drinks. Margaret watches him consider his surroundings. A cobweb puffs in a cornice. He sets the emptied jar on the counter and worries the point of the nail with his thumb. He’s wearing pleated khakis and a wine-colored golf tee damp at the armpits, bulging in a humid roll above his braided leather belt. He aims his paunch at her.
“He hasn’t called, e-mailed, anything?”
“Not for a week or two.”
“A week or two.” He flinches at the imprecision.
“Just tell me what it is, Parker.”
“Beer cans everywhere, dirty clothes. The whole place stank like yeast. Marijuana, too, I think.” He eyes her. “Not that you’d probably care about that.”
Toward the end of their marriage, there’d been a bad evening when Alice, hearing something in Margaret’s voice on the phone, came over with a swirled glass pipe and a plastic baggie, a vice Margaret hadn’t indulged since college. When Parker came home, he stood in the doorway of the den where Margaret and Alice had sprawled across the furniture, sniffed the air, and said, “You two ought to be ashamed.” And Margaret, to her horror, found that she was. The weight of his gaze could shame her.
Now she says, “Fuck you, Parker.”
And he actually recoils.
Her triumph is short-lived. He passes the nail from one hand to the other before bulling ahead. “So I shake some clothes off a chair and sit down, and I call Ryan. ‘Heard from your brother lately?’ And he says yeah, he has. Just last night Dennis calls, sounds like he’s in a bar. ‘Are you good? Are you happy?’ Dennis keeps asking. ‘How about Stephanie?’ And then he laughs – real slow, Ryan says, like water pouring from a jug. ‘What’s she wearing?’ he asks. And when Ryan asks what the hell, Dennis hangs up.”
“So he was out at a bar last night,” she says. “Maybe he stayed over at a friend’s place.”
Though of course things between Dennis and his friends haven’t been so good lately.
“Maybe,” Parker allows. “Could you just try calling him?”
Seven rings, then voicemail. “It’s Dennis,” Dennis’s voice says. “Leave one.”
What can she leave besides her number in his missed calls list? Margaret hangs up.
“What do you think?” Parker asks.
His uncertainty troubles her more than anything: Parker is actually worried. As long as she’s known him, Parker has had his concerns, his burdens and bothers – but he does not, as a rule, worry.
“I’ll keep trying,” she promises. “Meanwhile, Parker, I’d appreciate if you got out of here.”
Just like that, she banishes him – as simply as a dark thought.
Something has changed, though. She leans back, breathing deeply, but the house is too hot for comfort. John Quick is probably panting on the linoleum in the back bathroom. Stuck to the refrigerator, twitching in a draft, is the card that arrived in the mail a few weeks ago: a birth announcement, the veterinarian and his daughter and the in-laws. The pretty daughter and her husband, baby-faced beneath his beard, hold a fat little newborn between them. Ezra Arthur. The veterinarian smiles like his chest will burst. Dennis will call if he needs her – won’t he? The nail lies on the table where Parker left it, glinting.

Doc falls from his truck into the barnyard, the wet heat of the day. Harlan Trimble stands in a haze of exhaust and flying splinters. The chainsaw severs the trunk of the fallen crabapple. The broken tree shifts, the severed section rolling a few feet through the grass. Harlan kills the saw and grins around his tobacco. “Good firewood,” he says, shoving sweat across his brow. “Was going to cut it anyway.”
Last night’s storm has strewn the barnyard with branches, black shingles from the house and dark green ones from the barn, torn leaves, bits of trash. “Hell with it,” Harlan says, leading Doc into the barn. He’s in a vicious good humor. “Someone else’s problem, now.”
They are cataloguing Harlan’s animals for sale. It’s a small herd, the work of an afternoon. Body condition scores, general health checklists, records collected in an accordion file that Harlan will present to his accountant and to the clearinghouse that sells his cattle and equipment at public auction. In the barn, the Holsteins stand submerged in the heat and their own dull, inoffensive stink. Tails switch; flies circle and descend. An orange cat with a tattered ear leaps the gutter to accompany Harlan and Doc as they work. Harlan aims a lazy kick, but the cat springs aside with the nimbleness of a seasoned mouser and continues along untroubled.
Harlan spits. “I’m mean as a bastard lately. Don’t pay it any mind.”
It’s the land sale, he explains. A developer wants to purchase his acreage for a subdivision. They’re close enough to Asheville; the price is fair. But the developer refuses to purchase the land at the bottom of the pasture, down by the creek. “A floodplain,” Harlan says. “You believe it? Trickle of piss like that? Tell me how it floods.”
He’ll never sell it, he fears. He’ll die paying taxes on a strip of useless land he could pitch a stone across. And somehow, of course, the value of the land will still manage to rise as the subdivision grows; somehow, this will end up costing him a fortune.
“That’s how it works. That’s how they get you. You think you’ve given it all, everything you’ve got, but they always find a way to take a little more.”
Afterward, Doc leans in the door of the barn, under the drape of muggy shadow. His back aches. At one point, he had to leap away from a Holstein’s kick. Less spry than the cat, he may have pulled something. The tufted pasture rolls down to the creek, a wandering line of crack willows and high grass that by summer’s end will be all Harlan holds of this place. It was Noah Trimble’s farm before it passed to his son; Doc remembers the old man from years back, when he was fresh out of vet school and struggling to establish his practice, when Susan was his ride-along. Exhausted and sore, he suffers a premonition of himself dry-swallowing aspirin on this evening’s cramped flight to Lake Charles. But what else can he do? A pair of starlings foot around in the barnyard dirt. The cat rubs Doc’s knee, purring.
“How much you think I can get for this crabapple?” Harlan calls. “Twenty a cord?”

* * *

Three days have passed since Parker’s visit, and still Margaret can’t get Dennis on the line. Time and again: seven rings, voicemail, Leave one. Nothing, according to Parker, has changed at Dennis’s apartment. Wherever their son is sleeping, it’s not at home. “I knew something was wrong,” Ryan has called to say, more chidingly than perhaps he intends. But he hasn’t heard anything more from Dennis, either.
Crisscrossing Asheville, Parker has spoken with people who know their son, friends and former coworkers. “No leads yet,” he says. “My guess is he’s out of town.”
No leads. The hard-boiled language of the beat detective. Some part of Parker is relishing this, no doubt. Still, Margaret has to be impressed by his efforts. He’s always been rigorous, energetic, willing to exert himself in pursuit of whatever meets his narrow definition of a worthy cause. He can be almost admirable, really, when he’s not busy shaming others for doing differently – for doing, he would assert, less.
“We’re his parents,” he intones, harumphing, professorial. “We have a duty, a moral obligation . . .”
And what, meanwhile, has Margaret been doing? Calling. Five times today between dinner and bed, she dials Dennis’s number, hanging up each time before the beep. What can she possibly hope to accomplish by this? What will she say when he answers?
Parker, being Parker, says it’s time to go to the police. He will, as he puts it, use his connections. Margaret prays it doesn’t come to that, though prayer isn’t something she’s ever been very good at or even particularly interested in. My son, my boy, my son – a constant drumming. She sees Dennis again as he appeared to her at county lockup, bruised and vulnerable, burning the last of his defenses to make a few small jokes. She missed a chance that night, she thinks. A chance to say something, do something.
“I feel like I’ve fallen behind,” she’s confessed to Alice.
“Behind who?” Alice asked. “Honey, behind what?”
Margaret doesn’t know. A cold certainty has descended, incontrovertible, as sometimes happens in dreams: it is late and she is losing. How can she ever catch up?
Parker’s fault, she thinks. His visit activated something, flipping a switch she’d very deliberately turned off. She can almost feel the chemical commands circulating in her brain now, the biological imperatives taking over once more, transfiguring her desires. A flickering cascade, old wires sparking after a long dormancy.
My boy, my son –
Tonight, John Quick dozes beside the bed while Margaret ponders the net of shadows falling from window to floor. Around midnight, she calls twice more, five minutes apart. Twice she hears her youngest son’s recorded voice. Leave one. She leaves nothing. Whatever she needs to say, it seems, she needs to say it to a warm ear. The phone rings and rings, unanswered. Margaret dials and dials.

The dog dies. It’s not dramatic. The head lowers across folded paws. The breath trails away, and the eyes close like a doll’s. A relief: Win does not have to face the empty stare as she disposes of the needle, bags the body, and hefts it to the chest freezer. This week’s dead await the truck that will carry them to the state incinerator, where together they will be reduced to a single plume of ash, lighter and softer than feathers, released to drift above the Smoky Mountains.
At the end of the day, she locks the front doors and turns out the lights. In the office, the overnight volunteer looks up from her Sudoku and says, “Take care.” Win raises her palm. She hopes it looks like a wave.
It’s nearly eight in the evening. Thirteen hours ago, she arrived at the shelter knowing what would have to be done. The old mutt – part Carolina dog, part Plott hound, and who knows what else? – was suffering, and suffering had turned him fearful and wretched, quick to snap at fingers and growl at shadows, dragging locked, arthritic hips around his kennel to keep his teeth pointed at anyone who passed. For weeks, Win braved those teeth. The dog had an uncanny ability to detect pills hidden in hot dogs and pieces of cheese; he could not be coaxed or coerced into swallowing. So Win slipped into the kennel day after day with soft words and treats, settling to the cement floor and awaiting her moment. She sank needles so expertly he never noticed.
Freed from pain, she reasoned, a new creature might emerge. And to an extent, the carprofen worked: the dog’s posture improved, his gait, but not his demeanor. She could not get him to trust even her; each day she entered the kennel to heavy threats rasping like a saw in that bristling chest. She avoided eye contact, scattering little treats. “Who hurt you?” she whispered. “What did they do?” She pictured the old fractures tracing those hips. The dog only moaned, lapping a treat from the floor and offering her daily a chance with the needle.
Today, it wasn’t carprofen.
Why not work at a no-kill shelter, where the limitations of space and funding wouldn’t oblige her to murder one animal so that another – perhaps younger, healthier, more adoptable – could occupy its kennel? Alice asked her this, back when they were first getting to know one another. Win’s partner is the sweetest kind of pragmatist. She believes in the virtue of getting along, understanding that this requires continual forgiveness – of others, of the self. Win is different. “I’m on the front lines,” she told Alice. And there were front lines, she insisted; there was a war; every day the body count climbed. She, Win, would go where she was needed most, tireless and fierce, fighting for every adoption, every stay of execution, ready to struggle where others might shrug, a hand pressed to a wound to slow the bleeding that never stopped.
When she says things like this, speaking in glorious abstractions, Win can feel herself rise, shining and tall. But it’s different down in the muck of the day-to-day. The late-summer sun saddles a cleft between hills. Trees crowd the road, but their long shadows all seem to bend away from the car, which fills with a heat the air conditioner can’t dispel. She has failed so many times. Now more than ever she needs forgiveness, needs Alice.
A mile from home, she rolls through a stop sign at the juncture of two country roads. A squad car materializes, the world cascading with light. She pulls to the shoulder.
“Officer,” she says, “please. I live up the road. I’m almost home.”
His young, pale face leans down, innocent as a flower springing from his black uniform shirt. Despite a badge thick as a slice of bread, the fat heel of a pistol at his hip, and the little canister of pepper spray’s waspish gleam, he strikes her as somehow childlike. In his expression she reads a child’s perpetual surprise, a child’s simple faith.
“Deputy,” he corrects her. “And what you did was against the law.”
“Oh, you angel!” she cries. Who can live among people so inflexible and true?
He stares at her, briefly stunned – and then, miraculously, shakes his head and shrugs. “Just drive home carefully, ma’am.” He lets her off with a warning.
The evening’s first blessing.
And waiting for her at home, others.
The outside dogs come tearing around the corner of the house or down from the porch or out from beneath the shaggy hazels, thumping alongside the car as it rolls up the drive. As soon as she opens the door they’re upon her, all paws and hot breath, weaving around her legs as if to guide her away from the front door, to sustain her presence in their world just a little longer. They press to her thighs, waiting for her hands. Behind the house, bells are ringing: two she-goats will be tripping along the fence, craning their necks to see. The potbellied pigs will be blissed out in their wallow, the booted bantams scuttling for roly-polies in the dirt nearby. Win makes her way to the house. A bickering clutch of guinea fowl roll through the yard like speckled balls.
Inside, a cat springs away from the swinging door and ripples down the shadowed hall, where another peers through the crack of an open door like an elderly neighbor. Tetras swirl in their tank above a little catfish who meditates atop a log. In the den, a pair of canaries interlock arpeggios, and from beyond the curtain of evening light that leads to the back porch comes the pure, piercing scream of a macaw.
“Sit,” Alice says, setting a plate in front of her. The kitchen window’s stained-glass upper sash is as full of dancing colors as the fish tank. The plate holds a stir-fry of garden vegetables and rice noodles – as well as a fat scoop of buttermilk mashed potatoes.
Win’s guiltiest, most secret pleasure.
“Stopped by the steakhouse on my way home,” Alice says, sitting beside her. “I know what kind of day this was.”
From her bed by the pantry, Bella, a wizened old Lab-husky mix, raises her head to watch them eat. Years ago, she fell from a car as it sped down the interstate – or, more likely, was tossed, unwanted, out the wind-filled door. One forepaw is missing, one eye gluey and blind. But when she catches Win looking back, her tongue flops out. She smiles.
After dinner, Win walks the property, checking on the animals in a dusk the wavering gray of moth wings. The outside dogs escort her, a smelly phalanx. The goats lip halved apples from her hands. These are her rescues, come to her either through the shelter or through Doc Jeffries. Haphazardly, almost at random, she has managed to save a few herself; she has done that much, at least. Behind the back porch screens, she offers a shoulder to the macaw, who accepts it with sharp, articulate feet. During the day he likes to preside over the backyard and pasture, screeching orders and rebukes. Now, as she carries him to his cage for the night, he seizes her ear gently in his powerful beak and presses his firm tongue to the lobe like a secret.
In the den, Alice takes a bottle of Wild Turkey from the sideboard and splashes a finger’s worth into a pair of glasses. And as Win accepts her cup and sees, above it, the face of this woman who wants to share a drink with her at the end of a difficult day, it occurs to her that she has heard humans called “the commemorating animal.” This may not be strictly true – she thinks of dolphins nosing their dead through the sea – but there is something awful and intimate about this moment that may, in fact, be uniquely human, a blend of emotion that she loves but would wish on no other creature.
Alice raises her glass. “My dear,” she says. “My life.”
“Prost!” Win answers, a benediction and a plea, meaning May it be good.
The clink startles the canaries, who sing.
Later, as they pull back the light summer counterpane on the bed, Bella comes wobbling into the room. Pursuant her own uniquely canine calculations, she has chosen to sleep with them tonight. Win gathers the dog into her arms. Her body is exactly the weight of the body in the freezer, exactly the weight of Win’s treason. The old dog curls, nose beneath tail, and Win turns to bury her face against Alice’s neck. “I know,” Alice says. “I know.” One hand strokes circles into Win’s jerking shoulders. The other reaches out to set the alarm for tomorrow.

* * *

All night, Doc’s tossed and turned, trying to arrange himself around the glinting anxiety in his gut. There’s no good reason for it. He’s in Burt and Marianne’s guestroom – Tank’s room, once. There’s still a Saints poster over the bed, an inexpertly glued model of a Plymouth Barracuda and a thicket of wrestling trophies atop the dresser, a bookshelf full of Matt Christopher paperbacks and old In-Fisherman magazines. Doc recognizes the peculiar fond dereliction of objects abandoned by a grown child, beloved but unmissed. The bed’s comfortable enough. Several times, he’s drifted off – lulled, oddly, as if by a presence, as if he were not alone in the bed – but something always wakes him, a sudden pain. It’s early morning now, the end of his stay. His flight departs at noon.
Across the hall sleep Dani, Josh, and baby Ezra. Usually, this is the baby’s room, but the crib and accoutrements have been shifted for Doc’s visit. “I don’t mind,” Doc said. “I remember what babies are like.” But Dani insisted. Not just for Doc’s sake, Burt suggested the other afternoon, as they sipped sweet tea at a park overlooking the Calcasieu River. “That boy’s all hers, I’ll tell you.”
Dani and Josh are living with Josh’s parents. In a few months, they say, a year at most, they’ll move back to New Orleans. The city has a hold on their imaginations; when they speak its name, Doc senses the faint outlines of a dream they’ve constructed for themselves.
What can be done? Josh’s parents call Doc with their concerns, Marianne in the kitchen and Burt on the extension in the den. “That city,” says Burt. “If it were just the two of them, sure, but what about the baby?”
“It’s their life,” sighs Marianne, “not ours.”
Doc closes his eyes, trying one last time. He pictures the Calcasieu, blue where the sun strikes it and brown in the shade. His sweet tea is cold. Marianne packs the remains of lunch into a cooler while Burt sits beside him at the picnic table, his tee-shirt darkened by a round patch of sweat like a bullet hole over his heart. Dani and Josh stand together on the shore, Ezra’s head poised perfectly between theirs. Beyond them, the vertebral superstructure of a highway bridge curls over the water and descends into a field of petrochemical tanks on the far bank, white as stones. Silhouetted against the tanks, tiny figures cross back and forth. Some of them stop, turning to look. And it is here that the part of Doc that remembers he is lying in bed registers the soft descent of a familiar weight beside him, and this part of him cries out, Almost, almost! The river prickles, a sudden wind lifts his daughter’s hair, and a gull wheels overhead on black-tipped wings, tilting to consider him with its feral, red-rimmed eye.
He springs awake, his heart wrung out by some terrible anticipation. He is alone, and the baby is crying.
Voices whisper. A light turns on, then off. Across the hall, the door creaks open, and the cries drift away from the bedrooms, toward the front of the house.
Doc rises and steps into yesterday’s jeans, following a sudden, encompassing desire: Dani. Perhaps it’s the dawn, poised at that delicate, ashy hour when time hardly seems to pass, but he thinks that if he could only stand with her for a few private minutes in this strange place – just him, his child, and her child – that would be enough. It could carry him through until the next time, whenever that might be.
But Dani is asleep. From the hall, through her half-open door, he recognizes the form in the bed, just as immediately and automatically as he’s always been able to recognize it, through all its incarnations over the past twenty years. He hovers at the door a moment. She doesn’t stir.
For the rest of his life, Doc will never see his daughter often enough again.
Soft as a ghost, he floats to the front of the house. Not a floorboard creaks beneath him. In the living-room recliner rest Josh and the baby, slowly rocking. Captured in the archway as though beneath the dome of a bell jar, Doc lingers unseen. The young man wears only a pair of basketball shorts; the baby wears only a diaper. They press chest to chest. The young man’s head is bowed, his lips moving against the baby’s hair. In a soft, husky, quavering voice, he sings a song Doc remembers:

Who loves the sun?
Who cares that it makes plants grow?
Who cares what it does
since you broke my heart?

Doc slips outside, across the yard, into the street. He stands in an open neighborhood of modest brick houses, spindly pines, aboveground pools. The streetlights are powerless against the brightening sky – a larger sky than he’s used to, one that hints at the vastness to be found above the American West. During veterinary school, Doc spent a yearlong internship in Missoula, Montana. On his days off, he’d hike the hills surrounding the small brown-and-white city. The shadows of clouds poured across the valley, the Bitterroots marched away in echeloned waves, and Doc, who was not yet Doc, doubled over, gasping, his hands on his knees, his lungs seared by thin air and the impossible scale of his inheritance.
He is doubled again, gasping again.
His cell phone still sits in his pocket from yesterday, and it’s the simplest thing in the world – almost a reflex, really – to reach for it now and call Margaret Quick. For months, he’s found himself returning to their conversation, her story about her son’s appendectomy. Goodbye to that whole cup of trembling. The phone is ringing.
First she says hello. Then she says his name. Finally, she asks if he’s all right.
“No,” Doc says, “I’m not. I’m not.”
“What is it?”
There’s too much to explain – his whole life. So he stands there, panting into the phone, on some level aware that he must sound ridiculous, even disturbing. He awaits the click of the severed connection.
“Shhh,” she says. “Hey. Hey, there.”
And the strangest thing of all is that this seems to help. Small words, fond noises, the little humming sounds he himself makes when he’s at work with needle or scalpel. Like an animal, he absorbs these with a bare, mute understanding; afterward, it’s impossible to recall what, exactly, has been said. But it must count for something. Slowly, the weight of his grief shifts, until he can stand straight once more. The world reasserts itself, refusing to be long forgotten by any living thing. Light comes streaming over the roofs of houses; the sun rests on the same low branch of a loblolly as a small red squirrel, carelessly perched, twitching its tail. A white pickup rolls by – Doc has to step out of the way – and the bearded driver turns to stare. Doc waves, suddenly sheepish. He registers his own relief, yes, but also and perhaps more durably a sort of wry resignation, the embarrassment of being, after all, only human – wandering down a street of houses not his own, asking a blessing from a stranger.
“Hello?” she says. “Are you still there?”
“I’m sorry for calling.”
“No – don’t be.”
“I’m sorry,” he says and hangs up.
Nothing to do now but go back to the house. He’ll be home by midafternoon, and he has farms to visit in the evening, appointments to keep. He’s no braver than he ever was, or wiser, or more accepting. Just tired – and simply to step through a door and commence the responsibilities of the day, unpleasant though they may be, is itself a kind of rest.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, this time to the world.
Everywhere, the thoughtless morning forgives.

Margaret collapses into a chair on the back porch, trying to tamp down the beating of her heart. She has to be at work in an hour, which means she still needs to shower, dress, apply makeup, try to eat something. But when John Quick nudges her dangling palm, it’s all she can do to make her way to the screen door to let him out. She falls back into her chair, dead to all birdsong and the wind in the leaves.
This morning marks a week since Parker’s visit. Last night she slept fitfully, waking every hour or so to dial her son. In the dark, she could admit to herself that this was getting out of hand. She was ridiculous, aflame with anxiety, the light from the phone blazing against her cheek. Around four in the morning, her phone finally chirped in response.
ill call today
Just that. Already, her relief is shading into apprehension. Whatever comes next, it will mean the end of this new life, this period of blissful drift. Dennis will see to that. An ill call, indeed.
She spent the night on the back porch, listening to crickets and occasionally the radio, sipping tea. John Quick lay at her feet. The phone, finally ringing, flung her from a doze.
But it was the veterinarian, Dr. Jeffries.
She thinks his name once, firmly, as if to test it. His real name: Arthur.
It’s not an easy thought to have. The man’s a usurper; he has no claim on her. He intercepted a message meant for her son.
No, worse. Something in Margaret, traitorous and uncontrollable, welcomed him.
She can guess his motives. She has, through Alice, gleaned few things about his history, his situation, what Parker might term his particulars. And it’s true that, in one or two moments of perilously unguarded mulling, she’s compared him favorably enough to that other man at least – her ex-husband, the second great love of her life after Alice, the one against whom it seems she must still helplessly measure any man she meets.
Which is only to say, finally, that Arthur Jeffries has been in her thoughts, off and on, in a way that at least begins to explain why, when she heard pain in his voice and the supplication that accompanies pain, her whole body lifted in response.
Now, when Dennis does finally call, she’ll have to summon it all afresh – the ridiculous tenderness that always leaves her, as now, shaken and spent, faintly humiliated, as if publicly toppled by a wave she should have seen and avoided. The prospect wearies her.
She’ll do it, of course. Within an hour, she’ll be guiding numbers safely through their spreadsheets while her phone waits to fill with Dennis’s voice.
And after that?
There will be no climax, she’s sure, no sudden turn, no miraculous new life for any of them – just, at best, a resumption. She’ll gather the burdens she scattered, coming here. They’ll be just as heavy as before. Heavier, in fact, freighted with new additions.
“Quick! John Quick!”
Margaret leans in the frame of the open door, calling.
John Quick emerges from behind the ruined barn as if bursting from it. Here is a greyhound in furious motion, his body abandoned with reckless joy to its purpose. If he’s not as swift as he once was, if there’s rust in the load and spring of his spine, a limp in one forepaw that renders jagged what was once perfectly smooth, these things are simply reminders of the morning at the shelter when he became hers.
“He only has a few years left,” Win said. “He deserves good ones.”
The dog arrives, leaning against her thigh and gazing up with all the devotion a greyhound’s heart can hold. She praises and pets him, and when she goes in, he trots alongside her as if this is where he belongs. A few good years. That morning in the shelter, seeking mostly to upset that other woman’s expectations – Win, her impossible rival, whom she’ll never catch – Margaret placed a bet on herself whose stakes she’s just now realizing.
“I can give him that,” she said.

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Greg Schutz’s stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Sycamore Review, Carolina Quarterly, Third Coast, and Colorado Review.